


heartless!tobirama musings

by Anonymous



Category: Naruto
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-09
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26915929
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: I’ve been sitting on this for upwards of a year and haven’t been able to scrape together the energy to finish it. If anyone has ideas or wants to do something with it, 100% feel free, you’ve got by blessing, just let me know so I can read it when it’s posted.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 28
Collections: Anonymous





	heartless!tobirama musings

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve been sitting on this for upwards of a year and haven’t been able to scrape together the energy to finish it. If anyone has ideas or wants to do something with it, 100% feel free, you’ve got by blessing, just let me know so I can read it when it’s posted.

He sees Madara, stands before him as the ceremony is to start, and thinks,  _ This is Hashirama’s favored brother. _

The thought doesn’t pain him. 

<>

To find that he’s estranged his last remaining brother, doing something to protect him, no less, hurts him more than he will ever show, but he can grow beyond it. Bridges burned can be rebuilt. 

And then, belatedly, he analyzes how Anija acted with the Uchiha, what he said. 

Anija doesn’t talk to anyone like that. Not anymore, at least. He used to, with Kawarama, Itama, even Tobirama, until recently. Until Itama died. He doesn’t anymore, hadn’t rebounded from Itama’s death quite so quickly as he had Kawarama’s. He’d chalked it up to circumstances; two is quite less dire than one, thus eliciting a different response when the numbers thinned so. 

Anija’d talked to the Uchiha with freeness and familiarity, though. In a way he hasn’t spoken to Tobirama for a while. 

For a fleeting moment, Tobirama feels ... replaced.

He pushes it down as fast as it comes to the fore. That’s nonsense, of course. A notion without thought, obviously the grief-driven paranoia of his hindbrain, jealous and spiteful. 

He draws himself up to go over all the reasons that isn’t true, all the reasons Anija loves him, likes him more than that awful Uchiha brat. Because of course he does, doesn’t he? He’s his Anija, he has to. 

Except, he doesn’t. Have to, that is. Titles can be empty of regard, especially those given to family.

And it becomes increasingly clear that Anija doesn’t. He doesn’t train with Tobirama anymore, doesn’t flop and flounce, not even when he chases after Anija and volunteers one of his stupid obviously-not-actual-training-games because they haven’t spent time together in so long that he’ll take anything he can get Anija, he will, he won’t even argue, just accept the invitation to the stupid game, Anija, accept it. 

Instead Anija trains on his own, and hurries off to the river. To play with Uchiha Madara. 

With a twist to his heart that is barely tenable, he realizes he’s been cast aside in favor of something new. 

By his last brother. He wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t enough to save Itama, he’s not enough to keep Anija. 

He’s never been one for superstition, and he’d be mortified if anyone knew what was coming into his head, but in this one, fleeting moment, he hears Anija say ‘bad things come in threes’ like the foolish, illogical boy he is, but that’s his Anija and what if he’s right? What if something happens again? Two things in quick succession and he’s shaking like an autumn leaf in the wind. He can’t bear a third, couldn’t survive it without coming apart. He doesn’t know how his bones will pop apart, how his skin will shed, his flesh unravel, but it will happen, surely. Already, he’s on the brink of it. 

And there’s one more to go, yet.

So when an idea flickers into his head, horrible and ugly and not-to-be-tried, he doesn’t turn it away as he should. As he would. 

But he’s eleven, and he’s just lost his brother, the last. He fears something greater, and sees a way out of it. 

After a fashion, at least. 

<>

( It’s so much louder here, in his hands. It’s a wonder no one can feel the hum-pulse of it in the empty night. )

( Or is it merely that no one cares to hear it? )

<>

It’s quite a lovely evening, really. The moon is out the sky, so the stars are bright. That it’s terribly dark only helps him all the more, as does the rock-swish-sway of the wind bending boughs. It all very much helps him slip from tree to tree without notice, to hide another something which might get him in trouble. 

Even father would be mad at him, if he learned that Tobirama had excised his heart. He might have him exiled, if not killed, for such a trespass of the gift of life. 

Both of which would be terribly inconvenient. Tobirama would seek to avoid such a thing. 

So he’s hiding his heart: he can’t destroy it, preliminary tests would suggest that that way lies death; he can’t leave the evidence around for someone to find, as Hashirama might well do, with Tobirama’s luck as it is; not to mention that Touka would shove it back into his chest just to rip it out again. All various flavors of to-be-avoided.

It’s still black as pitch when he arrives at the river, but it’s nevertheless a simple task to coax the water to go around him when he steps beyond the shore. Finding a place to put his heart is another matter, but he finds a large enough nook in which to place the box encasing it, manages to find a few rocks to cover it as discreetly as possible. Not that people are likely to go about looking for things in a riverbed, but Anija’s not the only person who knows of this stretch of running water these days.

He knows he oughtn’t be putting it here, should consider dropping it to the depths of the sea, under the mountainous sands of Kaze no Kuni, but.

This place was Anija’s once. Leaving his heart here feels something like entrusting it to his care, as far from reality as that notion may be. 

The line of thought is as nonsensical as they come, for Tobirama, but if he’s to be allowed one final irrationality before distance strips them from him one by one, he is content for it to be this. 

Anyway, it’s not like anyone would know to look for it there. Not that anyone would go looking for it. Not that they’d know it gone in the first place. 

Perhaps Tobirama is the dutiful soldier Hashirama thinks him to be; perhaps the fading grief, like a weight gradually lifted, had hastened his steps. Regardless, he’s back much faster than he’d expected, a good few hours before sunrise. He slips into his room and, heedless of Hashirama’s snores and shifting the wall over, sits to work on mapping the nervous system - or, rather, his own - until dawn.

His is missing the atrioventricular node, unfortunately, but he’s cut up enough rodents and livestock to have a good enough idea of how it ought to be situated. He does well enough without it. 

<>

Izuna hates how indifferent he is. It’s not even a mask, there’s just nothing in his head that isn’t science or math or stupid paperwork to make everyone miserable. 

He treats Izuna with kindness, always turned the flat of his blade to him since the moment Hashirama asked (shrieked, demanded) it of him. Healed him the one time he didn’t, before even Madara could get there himself.

Izuna hates it, too. He used to rage and scream of it, the careless indifference he was faced with so much more aggravating than any mutual hatred might be. He hates the careful step Tobirama affords him, very clearly only because he wants to work well with him, because he knows Izuna has misgivings while bearing none of his own. He is perfectly, unwaveringly civil with them, and not even in the vaguely spiteful, because-it-must-be-so sort of way. No, he’s almost what the civvies might call neighborly, what with all his bland politeness and dead-end small talk. 

Izuna hates the unfeeling, empty person before him, the little brother who seems not to bask in the love of his elder brother as Izuna does his own. Not that it’s turned on Tobirama quite so frequently as Madara’s is on him, but nonetheless. He humors his brother at best, is never not an empty meat suit without emotions. 

(He wasn’t like this at the river, wasn’t dead-empty-devoid of even rage. He’d been furious, had fought ferociously. In the many times they’ve met since, he’s been anything but. Clinically efficient, yes, uncaring even. Not once since has Izuna seen him move with anything close to anger, or shock even. Clinical, cold, precise, that’s all he is. He was more, once. There was a caring to him. Izuna doesn’t know why he fights anymore. First, he knew there was protectiveness, maybe even hate. He knew they’d meet again as the clan heads’ sons. He was excited for it, the heat and the fervor. 

(When they next met, Tobirama had none.) 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for taking the time!! Have a lovely day


End file.
